Tokyo & Kantō

Tokyo — The City That Rewrites Itself

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Tokyo reinvents itself every decade. The city that existed before the 1964 Olympics was largely replaced; the one before the 1923 earthquake barely survives in photographs. What remains is a city with almost no historical centre — no Colosseum, no Acropolis — but an extraordinary concentration of craft, food, design, and subculture distributed across dozens of distinct neighbourhoods.

The standard itinerary — Senso-ji, Shibuya Crossing, Shinjuku, Tokyo Tower — gives you the city's icons. But Tokyo's real texture is in its backstreets: the 40-seat ramen shop whose owner trained for six years before opening; the jazz bar in a basement under a dry cleaner; the knife shop in Kappabashi that has been sharpening the same family's blades for three generations.

Tokyo Skytree, at 634 metres, is the world's tallest broadcast tower and offers the clearest view of the city — on clear winter days, Mt Fuji appears on the horizon. The older Tokyo Tower, half the height, still draws visitors for the views and for its nostalgic, Eiffel-influenced silhouette that appears in countless films set in postwar Japan.

Shinjuku & Shibuya — The Famous and the Real

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Shinjuku Station is the world's busiest, handling over 3.5 million passengers a day across 50 exits. The east side is neon — Kabukicho entertainment district, the Robot Restaurant (a deliberate spectacle for tourists), the department stores along Shinjuku Dori. The west side is corporate — skyscrapers, city hall, the observatory at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (free, and the best free view in the city).

Golden Gai — a grid of alleyways packed with some 200 tiny bars, each seating six to twelve people — survived successive waves of development through sheer stubbornness. Most bars have a cover charge and a personality that reflects the owner's obsessions: jazz, horror films, cats, 1970s rock. You pick one, squeeze in, and talk to whoever is there. It's the closest thing Tokyo has to a village pub.

Shibuya Crossing is real — it handles 3,000 people per cycle at peak times, scrambling from every direction simultaneously. The famous view from the Starbucks above is now replicated from a dozen other vantage points, including a free observation deck on the Shibuya Scramble Square building. But the crossing itself, on street level, is something you experience rather than photograph: you become part of the flow.

Yanaka & Shimokitazawa — The Neighbourhoods Locals Love

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Yanaka escaped the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 firebombing, which is why it still has the look of prewar Tokyo — low wooden buildings, a cemetery that doubles as a park, temples at every turning, a shopping street (Yanaka Ginza) that sells sembei crackers and tofu and bronze cats and has done so for a hundred years. It is popular with Tokyoites on Sunday afternoons precisely because it feels like somewhere else.

Shimokitazawa, in Setagaya Ward, is what happens when artists, musicians, and theatre people colonise a neighbourhood for long enough to change its character permanently. The streets are narrow, the buildings are old, and the density of live music venues, vintage clothing shops, and independent curry restaurants per square metre is probably unmatched in Japan. Shimo, as locals call it, resists change loudly — a proposed highway through the area was fought off over decades of protest.

• Koenji — Tokyo's punk and alternative rock neighbourhood; old-school record shops alongside good indie bookstores
• Nakameguro — the canal district; good coffee shops and boutiques, especially during cherry blossom season when the canal banks turn pink
• Kagurazaka — former geisha district, now home to French restaurants and Japanese bistros in converted machiya; Tokyo's quietest cosmopolitan neighbourhood
• Nezu — adjacent to Yanaka; smaller, less visited, with a beautiful small shrine whose tunnel of torii gates rivals Fushimi Inari at a fraction of the crowd

Asakusa — Old Tokyo, Still Standing

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Senso-ji is Tokyo's oldest temple — founded, according to legend, in 628 AD when two fishermen pulled a golden image of Kannon from the Sumida River. The Kaminarimon ('Thunder Gate') with its enormous red lantern is the city's most photographed spot. The Nakamise shopping street leading to the main hall has sold souvenirs, snacks, and traditional crafts since the Edo period, and most of what's sold today is still made by hand.

Asakusa is Tokyo's most concentrated surviving fragment of the shitamachi — the 'low city' that was home to artisans, merchants, and craftspeople during the Edo period. The streets behind the temple, away from the tourist circuit, still have workshops making traditional items: combs from boxwood, fans from mulberry paper, folding paper lanterns. The Tokyo Skytree rises directly behind the temple complex, creating one of the city's characteristic juxtapositions.

Kamakura — The Great Buddha and the Trails

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Kamakura was Japan's de facto capital from 1185 to 1333, when the military government of the Kamakura shogunate ruled from here while the emperor remained in Kyoto. Today it is a coastal town of 170,000, one hour south of Tokyo by train, whose narrow valleys are packed with 65 Buddhist temples and 19 Shinto shrines. The Great Buddha — Kotoku-in's 13.35-metre bronze Amida — has sat in the open since its hall was washed away by a tsunami in 1498.

What the day-trippers miss is the hiking. The Daibutsu Hiking Course connects Kita-Kamakura to Hase in about 90 minutes, threading through bamboo groves, small woodland shrines, and viewpoints over the town and sea. The Tenen Trail takes the serious walker further, past Zuisen-ji and along the ridgelines to Zuigangen-ji. Both trails are genuinely wild in the middle and require no particular equipment beyond sturdy shoes.

Nikkō — Edo Splendour in the Mountains

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Nikkō sits 140 kilometres north of Tokyo in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture, and it contains what may be the most ornate collection of religious buildings in Japan. The Toshogu Shrine complex was built in 1634 to enshrine Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the shogunate that ruled Japan for 250 years. The builders were given an essentially unlimited budget and a mandate to outdo everything that had come before. They succeeded.

The famous 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' monkeys carved above the sacred stable are just one detail in a complex of 55 structures covered in gold leaf, lacquer, and carvings of every animal and plant in the Japanese imagination. The approach to the shrine, through a cedar avenue planted in the 1630s by a feudal lord who could not afford a better gift, is one of the most atmospheric walks in Japan. Lake Chuzenji, reached by the 48-hairpin Irohazaka road above town, adds mountain scenery to the cultural visit.

teamLab — Art You Walk Through

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teamLab Planets in Toyosu is a barefoot experience: visitors remove their shoes and walk through knee-deep water, lie in fields of bioluminescent light, and watch digital koi swim around their feet. It opened in 2018 as a temporary installation and has been extended repeatedly — now running until at least 2027 — because the waiting list never shortens. A 2025 expansion added three new spaces, including an Athletics Forest.

teamLab Borderless, which originally opened in Odaiba in 2018 and drew 2.3 million visitors a year before closing for redevelopment, reopened at Azabudai Hills in central Tokyo in early 2024. The 'borderless' concept — artworks that move between rooms and respond to visitors, forming a single continuous world — is technically and experientially different from Planets. Both are worth seeing; neither is a substitute for the other.

Getting Around Tokyo

Tokyo's train network is the most extensive and punctual in the world: over 150 rail and subway lines, averaging a delay of under one minute annually. The two main systems are JR (including the Yamanote Loop that circles central Tokyo) and the Tokyo Metro/Toei subway lines. Most visitors navigate the city using both interchangeably.

• IC card (Suica/Pasmo) — the simplest solution: tap on, tap off, works on every train, subway, bus, and monorail in the greater Tokyo area, plus payment at convenience stores
• Yamanote Line — JR loop that connects every major district: Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Akihabara, Ueno, Ikebukuro. A complete circuit takes 60 minutes.
• Tokyo to Kamakura — JR Yokosuka or Shonan-Shinjuku Line to Kita-Kamakura or Kamakura (55–75 min, ¥940)
• Tokyo to Nikkō — Tobu Nikko Line from Asakusa direct, or JR + Tobu from Ueno (about 2 hours, ¥1,360–2,620 depending on express type)